The 1889 World’s Fair had the Eiffel Tower. The 1893 World’s Fair had the Ferris Wheel. And the 1968 World’s Fair had the Tower of the Americas.
The Tower of the Americas, getting on towards sunset, Christmas Day, 2015.
The centerpiece and theme structure of HemisFair ’68, the tower still dominates the skyline of San Antonio today. The Tower of the Americas is known largely for four things:
Fireworks. Traditionally, the city’s official Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve fireworks display have been set off with the Tower as a backdrop.
The annual Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Lonestar Tower Climb and Run. This is a one-mile run followed by a quick jog up the steps in the core of the Tower. Climbing the steps of the Tower sounds like fun. Running up the steps does not sound like fun.
The rotating restaurant at the top of the Tower. For years the restaurant was operated by the same people who run the Jim’s restaurant chain. In 2004 the concession was taken over by Landry’s. Landry’s is a Texas chain of seafood restaurants that are nicer than casual dining, but not so fancy as what you normally think of when you think of a “fine dining” establishment. Traditionally, my family would go to the Landry’s that used to be on Riverside Drive* when we would go up to Austin to watch the bats at the Ann Richards/Congress Avenue Bridge. We could drop in in our jeans and t-shirts and not feel out-of-place. The Chart House Restaurant, the restaurant in the Tower, is fancy. Lots of tourists probably drop in in their jeans and t-shirts, and I’m sure they get fine service, but if you go, you probably want to wear your nicest jeans and a polo shirt instead, perhaps.
The observation deck. This is what most people go up in the tower for. There are two levels — an interior section that had historic photographs showing what things used to look like in the direction where you are looking and an exterior level that has only plexiglass and wires separating you from the outside. It was very windy in the exterior observation deck the day we went.
*This restaurant is, as of the time I’m writing this, a Joe’s Crab Shack.
New New York, by Pete Hamill, photographs by George Steinmetz
Hamill, who was 80 years old at the time he wrote this article, grew up in New York City. He explored it on foot and by subway through the decades, and in New New York, he looks back at the New York City of his youth and compares it to the New York City of today. To some extent, Hamill seems to be having a “hey, you kids, get out of my yard” moment, to the extent that they have yards in New York City. You know what I mean.
One of Hamill’s chief complaints is that the old neighborhoods are going away, being replaced by high-rise apartment buildings. I have to admit that I share Hamill’s disdain for 432 Park Avenue, a big stick with windows a couple of blocks southwest of Central Park (see image). However, part of the loss of neighborhoods can be placed on the emphasis on suburbs in the United States over the last seventy years. Men who went off to fight in World War II came home and moved out of the cities into the suburbs, where instead of streetcars, they had automobiles and instead of neighborhoods, they had housing developments. Three generations (1946-1966, 1966-1986, and 1986-2006) have grown up living in separate boxes and traveling to jobs, schools, stores, churches, etc., in separate boxes. The cohesiveness of a neighborhood is foreign to them. And now, to get ahead in their jobs, they are moving into the cities and taking their isolation with them.
432 Park Avenue, taken from the Empire State Building, July 2015. You can see Central Park off there in the distance.
Hopefully this isolation will only be temporary. Once they discover the joys of being able to walk where they need to go, neighborhoods will form again. Their children’s generation will be likely to connect, and reconnect, in both new and old ways. Perhaps the old neighborhoods will never return, but it will be interesting to see what this new generation of city dwellers will create.
Haiti on Its Own Terms, by Alexandra Fuller, photographs by students of FotoKonbit
FotoKonbit is a project that allows Haitians to borrow cameras and photograph Haiti as they experience it. Too many people outside Haiti merely hear of strife, poverty, and natural disasters. FotoKonbit works with students both in the cities and in the rural areas to learn photographic skills and to show the outside world the beauty of Haiti as well.
The text accompanying these photographs goes into the history of Haiti and also a bit of its future. You see, Haiti has billions of dollars of resources under its soil and someday people may come from outside to exploit them. This could be a benefit, if the companies extracting the wealth do it in a responsible manner and pay a fair price, or a disaster, if the companies follow business as usual and ruin the environment while cheating the Haitians out of what is fairly their own.
When my now-ex and I split up, I had been through a lot. I had had cancer, my mother had died, and then my marriage had ended (and with it, my hopes of ever having a second child). I was a little depressed during the final days of my marriage, and after my marriage ended, the depression got even worse. I found it hard to do things like get out of bed, much less getting the energy together to cook.
But I didn’t have enough money to go out to eat daily, plus with my history of cancer, I really needed to “eat in” as much as possible. So I came up with a scheme. For every day I cooked, I would put a certain amount of money aside. This dollar amount was about half of what I estimated that a restaurant meal would have cost for Alex and me.
Eventually, that money grew into a regular allowance. Entertainment, restaurant food, and work snacks and lunches all come out of that allowance. At the end of the month, anything left of my allowance gets transferred into my vacation fund account. If I stopped spending anything on entertainment, restaurant food, or work food, I could probably afford to go to Europe every other year, just based on that money. Unfortunately, I do still eat work lunches, and Alex and I do go to the occasional movie or restaurant. But still, it adds up.
Oh, and by the way, despite having been given six raises (one per year) and three promotions, I’ve never given my allowance a raise. I have considered it, but I’m used to doing the math based on that number and I don’t know how I would adjust it to make it as easy to keep track of. Maybe someday I’ll be able to work it out.
This will be kind of a short post, just to fill in the missing five years here.
I honestly thought that we went to EPCOT in 1982, but we were in Florida in July and EPCOT didn’t open until October. Though that might explain why I have a memory of Spaceship Earth, which is the big golf-ball-looking structure, still under construction. We probably went to The Magic Kingdom and saw Spaceship Earth from a distance.
I wish I could find our photo albums from these years.
Since I don’t think we went anywhere in 1983, 1984, 1985, or 1986 (though I would be thrilled to be proven wrong), I guess that next up was our family trip to Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio in 1987. We returned to some of our haunts from our 1980 trip and added a few more.
I do have photographs from this trip, mostly taken by my mom, so I will be adding them as appropriate once I start making those posts in another six days or so.
You will also see the first 400 words that I had already written on EPCOT in another couple of months, once I get to 1989.
We get a lot of lists of ships and ocean depths here. Also lists of the temperatures and salinity of the ocean at different locations. Really gripping stuff. Why are there no charts in this article? A few nautical charts or maps or something would have made this much more intelligible.
At this point, Dyer seems pretty convinced that oceanic currents stem exclusively from wind; things like differentials in temperature and/or salinity didn’t figure into it at all, apparently. So, from a “so this is what things were like when people were just starting to science,” perspective, this article was pretty interesting.
Report — Geography of the Air, by A.W. Greely
At this point, I can’t even. Really, the opening sentence says it all, In presenting to the National Geographic Society a summary of geographic advance as regards the domain of the air, the Vice-president finds a task somewhat difficult. I would think so, because, well, air. It moves, which is something that apparently the National Geographic Society was just figuring out in 1889.
This list in this article is of meteorologists and what they’ve discovered, which was actually a bit more interesting than most of the lists in this issue. Still not a page-turner, but at least something to hold the interest for a while.
Report — Geography of Life, by C. Hart Merriam
Merriam admits upfront here that he cannot summarize what others have done this year in terms of the “geography of life,” because there have been no publications on the topic. So, he instead spends his nine paragraphs on what he believes the purpose of the Department of Life to be.
This made article one of the few interesting parts of this issue, even if it’s a bit difficult to summarize. Merriam envisions making maps of where different species are to be found and then being able to create “natural faunal districts” from them. I wonder if he ever followed through on this plan.
Next up, more December 2015 (we go to New York City next) and then, on my roughly-weekly walk on Monday, April 11, I will keep reading July 1889. I’m going to spend about an hour walking, so I doubt I’ll be able to make it through all of the rest of The Rivers and Valleys of Pennsylvania (I’ve tackled the first two of the five sections at this point), but I’ll give it my best shot.
I’m currently in the process of rethinking our upcoming travel schedules. Not for 2016; those are paid for and thus graven in stone at this point. Rather, I’m rethinking 2017 and following years. Originally, we were planning to go to Europe in 2017, but then I discovered the SAIL Amsterdam event, which is an event where tall ships converge on Amsterdam every five years. The next one will be in 2020. I really wanted to take Alex for this, however, SAIL Amsterdam is held in late August, which would interfere with his school schedule (even though Alex will be in college by then).
When I was considering taking Alex to SAIL Amsterdam, I thought about taking Alex to Canada in 2017. Then I discovered that SAIL Amsterdam was too late in the summer, so I was back to Europe in 2017. However, when I was researching other tall ships events, I found that there is a tall ships thing in Quebec City during what would be my normal window for our big vacation (from the Monday after the second Friday in July until the fourth Friday in July) in 2017. This is perfect. I had also hoped to return to New York City in July of 2017 anyhow, so we could fly out to New York, then take the train from there. It would probably be easier to take the train from New York to Toronto then go in a circle, coming back to New York from Montreal, but we wouldn’t be able to spend much time in Toronto that way, not and make it to Quebec City in time. Maybe Montreal, then right to Quebec City and then take our time coming back through Montreal to Toronto and back to New York? That’s got some potential.
I’m not sure what will happen with Europe now. 2018? We usually go to see a volcano in even-numbered years, and there are three volcanoes in Germany, so we could do that. Or we could stick with our current plan to go to Seattle (Mount Rainier would be our volcano in that case) in 2018 and go to Europe in 2019.
If we do the New York to Canada and back to New York thing in 2017, both times I’ve flown out of Terminal 2 at JFK, I’ve had terrible vertigo, so don’t let me forget my Benadryl.
The Institute of Texan Cultures (“ITC”) is hard to really pin down simply. The building was the Texas Pavilion in HemisFair ’68 and the ITC is now a museum dedicated to the cultural origins of Texans, I guess? Inside the museum, there are sections dedicated to the prehistoric peoples of Texas, the indigenous population, and many of the (largely European) nations that had immigrants to Texas (Germany has a large section which includes an entire gazebo). There is also a display on the history of Jewish people in Texas, and an entire sharecropper’s cabin from the early 1900s.
The Institute of Texan Cultures, San Antonio, Texas, in 2014.
Outside the building is what is known as the “back forty.” This area holds a number of buildings representing different eras of Texas’s history. There’s a one-room schoolhouse, an adobe house, a “dogtrot” log cabin (that is a kind of cabin that has two separate buildings connected by a sort of breezeway), a stone building that is supposed to represent the forts of Texas, and a barn.
From what I can determine, the ITC is a pretty standard fourth-grade field trip in San Antonio. In Texas, fourth grade is dedicated to Texas state history. I was one of the chaperones when Alex’s fourth-grade class made the trip, so I’ve had that experience, at least.
Once you’re out of fourth grade, however, the only time most residents are likely (though not, of course, guaranteed) to return is for one of the two annual festivals held there. The first weekend after the lunar new year is the Asian New Year festival. City organizations representing many of the cultures of Asia that have communities here come and sell representative samples of food. Traditionally, I get a masala dosa (from the Indian vendor), a bubble drink (from Tong’s Thai) and a kalua pork (from the Hawaiian vendor). Martial arts and Asian dancing organizations give demonstrations and/or performances, as appropriate, and the San Antonio Bonsai Society and Ikebana San Antonio also have displays on the ground floor of the building.
The other festival is the Texas Folklife Festival, held the second weekend of June. The Texas Folklife Festival is a much bigger deal. You can buy the t-shirts not just at the event but in stores as well. A lot of the same Asian vendors are there for the Folklife Festival, and there are a lot of other cultures represented, including a Native American booth, and a large number of European cultures (Germany, Belgium, Scotland, Ireland, and others — in past years they have had a Czech booth and a Spanish booth, but neither has been there in recent years). I at the very least have to get a Belgian waffle, though they’re just ordinary waffles and not liège waffles. But regular waffles are okay in my opinion. Sandy Oaks Olive Orchard traditionally has a vendor table, and I bought a sapling from them back in, oh, 2006 or 2007, I think. I had my first crop of olives in 2014. It rained too much for olives in 2015. It may have rained enough that it won’t fruit this year, either.
All in all, though, even if you aren’t there for one of the festivals (though if you are able to be there for either one, I highly recommend going), it’s a nice little history museum and, if you didn’t attend fourth grade in San Antonio, it’s probably worth a trip.
As I write this, on April 2, 2016, I am almost done with the June April 1889 issue. I should finish it tomorrow during my greenway hike. I haven’t decided which greenway I’m going to hike on. It’s likely that it’ll be the Leon Creek Greenway, since I’m closer to being finished with that one. I’ve only walked from about halfway between Huebner Road and Hardberger Park to the point where the trail goes under US 281.
Update, April 3, 2016: I ended up finishing up the northern end of the Salado Creek Greenway. Now I can say that I’ve walked that entire greenway north from US-281.
The Virgin Mary: The Most Powerful Woman in the World, by Maureen Orth, photographs by Diana Markosian
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not Catholic. As a Protestant, I don’t believe that Mary stayed a virgin after the birth of Jesus. The “brothers and sisters” mentioned in verses like Matthew 13:55 & 56 and Mark 6:3 are, well, the children of Mary and Joseph. Not Jesus’s cousins. Not the children of Joseph and an unnamed first wife. Therefore, throughout this article, I will strive to always call her just “Mary.” I did grow up in a predominantly Catholic area, so an occasional “Virgin Mary” may slip in.
This article focuses largely on apparitions of Mary. We start in Medugorje, and make mentions of Fatima, Portugal; Kibeho, Rwanda on our way to discuss the “Virgin of Guadalupe,” the 1531 apparition of Mary to Juan Diego (who was canonized in 2002) on Tepeyac Hill in Mexico City. After Mary appeared to Juan Diego, the bishop wanted some proof, so Mary had Juan Diego fill his cloak with roses. When Juan Diego brought the roses to the bishop, the cloak had the image of Mary on it. The cloak has been on display in an series of shrines, churches, and finally, a basilica since then. Orth spends a couple hundred words describing the image, yet there is no picture of it in the article. I took a quick trip down to the Oblate Seminary to visit their Tepeyac Shrine (and also their Lourdes Grotto and the accompanying chapel), then discovered that the Wikimedia photograph I had used as a reference when reading the article was in the public domain, so I’ll be including that (if WordPress will let me upload it. Grrr.). I am pretty proud of the picture of the statue that I took, though, so maybe I’ll use that, as well.
The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the cloak of Saint Juan Diego. A public domain image downloaded from Wikimedia Commons
One turn of phrase had me wondering about Orth’s religious background. She describes the image on the cloak as perhaps showing Mary “dancing in prayer.” This is not a common phrase. In fact, Google has only around 79,000 hits for the phrase, and at least once, there’s a comma in between “dancing” and “in.” Apparently, she is Catholic, so I wish she had elaborated on that phrase.
Orth also discusses the importance of Mary in Islam and we meet Muslim women who go into Christian churches to venerate Mary. Orth also tells about an apparition of Mary in Cairo, Egypt, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And then we finally get to Lourdes. The Song of Bernadette with Jennifer Jones was one of my favorite movies when I was growing up (I seem to recall that they used to show it every Easter on WGN). When we were moving during my childhood, we kept the stuff that we didn’t want the movers to handle in a self-storage place that backed up to I’m-not-even-sure what. A kind of unkempt marshy area. I used to like to visit it and never quite understood why until my mom pointed out that it looked kind of like the grotto from the movie. So I quite liked this part, though I was still kind of annoyed at the lack of images of the Virgin of Guadalupe that I didn’t like it as much as I should have.
The Science of Delicious, by David Owen, photographs by Brian Finke
I wasn’t sure what to expect of this article, since I’m a “nontaster.” Stuff like mayonnaise and sour cream tastes nasty to me, as do wine and cilantro. As a result, I’m far more motivated by texture than by flavor. I don’t like the texture of fat in my mouth, so when the low-fat diet became a “thing,” it was wonderful. I could order chicken without the skin or other lean protein choices without seeming like a “picky eater.” I could order things without the heavy cream sauces or avocado and the waiter would just chalk it up to attempting to be a healthy eater.
Owen assumes that everyone experiences broccoli as bitter, but I don’t. I’m highly motivated by my sense of smell, so while I quite like raw broccoli, I don’t eat cooked broccoli at all. Cooking brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc.) releases sulfur compounds which makes them smell bad. Anything that smells like that will never make it past my nose. I have one co-worker whose daily lunch of microwaved broccoli nearly drove me from our break room more than once.
Aside from the anti-broccoli bias, the article is pretty even-handed. It mostly talks about the relatively recent discovery that the tongue really has the same kinds of taste buds all over it (as opposed to the mapped out areas that people of my age learned about in school) and that we have two senses of smell — the one that comes through our noses and one that comes up the back of the nasal cavity. The smells that go up the back of the nasal cavity register in the same part of the brain that registers taste.
Owen talks about sweetness a lot, and this is another place where I am an outlier. Artificial sweeteners (including sucralose) taste bitter to me. The only non-sugar sweeteners that taste good to me are the sugar alcohols such as mannitol and xylitol. Fortunately, I don’t seem to be subject to the digestive distress that some experience from sugar alcohols.
My now-ex, Alex, and I all took an actual test to determine our taster gene status. I bought testing papers from a scientific supply company and everything (this is why I can say for certain that I’m a nontaster). Alex is a supertaster and his tastes and mine are much closer than either of ours with his dad (who is a regular taster). Alex actually prefers things a little blander and lower-fat than I do, even.
To recap, I lost my data drive back in December and have been trying to catch up to where I was the last time I backed up, in September. I am also backing up on a daily (or at least weekly) basis. I have a 32 gig SD card and every day (or two, or week, but no less frequently than that), I find every file I’ve changed that day/two days/week and copy it to a directory named for that day’s date. I’ve been doing this since December and I still have 24 gig free on the card.
The most challenging part of this process is finding the files I’ve changed that day. I have Windows 8.1 and one of the changes from Windows 8 is that when you search for files, it also pulls up the directory, so that, if you have, say five pictures in that directory, all modified that day, you will end up finding ten files — the five files and the five files in the directory. I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure out why it does that, and, more importantly, how to stop it.
This also makes it hard to take a count of how many pictures I’ve scanned in. I think I’m at around 4,700, but don’t know for certain. I’m currently in the middle of scanning in a book of pictures of my uncle and his family that I think my mom inherited from my maternal grandfather. I think I’m pretty close to halfway done with this book, but I just realized that I should probably be scanning in the captions from the back. I’ve done that with other albums, so I should do it with this one.
That sound you heard was my head hitting my desk. Repeatedly.
Just don’t let me forget to back this stuff up tonight. . . .
45 minutes later: Apparently I hadn’t missed that many captions, because I’m now caught up on scanning in the backs of the pictures just in time to give my dad his eyedrops, take my own inhaler, and head off to bed.
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out whether we did anything new on our Florida trip other than visiting EPCOT at Walt Disney World.
Let’s see. My mom had talked to my cousin and my cousin had told her that my other cousin (her son) had bought all of the Dungeons and Dragons manuals and that they contained the ritual for a black mass*. My mom believed it, but I didn’t. So I remember spending a lot of time reading manuals looking for that passage. I never found it, believe it or not. My mom believed my cousin until the day she died. When a group approached her to allow them to play D&D in her library, she refused based on my cousin’s story.
I saw Poltergeist on that trip. I somehow ended up sitting between my cousin and her husband, and her husband literally sat there and laughed at me for being frightened. I was one of those kids who always thought that there was something under my bed when I was little, so Spielberg’s script and Hooper’s direction played right into those early childhood fears in a way that would have had me chewing on my fingernails, if I had had even the slightest beginning of an inkling how to chew my fingernails (I made a friend who chewed his a few years later and somehow it was totally different from what I’d imagined).
I guess the only other interesting thing about that part of the trip was my first outing without a bra (I left my strapless bra at home and my dress had spaghetti straps). Fortunately I’m not abundantly endowed, so while it was kind of awkward, it didn’t actually hurt like it would have been for some of the women I’ve been friends with.
We had car trouble on the way home and ended up unexpectedly spending the night in Tennessee. Fortunately the mechanic was able to get the part we needed and get us on the road. The night we got home, our dog was still being boarded at the vet’s office, so we dropped off our suitcases and went to see E.T.
